This is lovely, and hit me hard. Mae Dean, a webcomic author, comes out as trans and has a conversation with herself.

This arrived yesterday.

Including obtaining medical reports, the process of getting my Gender Recognition Certificate took ten months and cost nearly £300.

I have mixed feelings. That’s partly because I felt I had to get the certificate: the messages coming from the UK government make me worried that it may remove some anti-discrimination protections from trans people who don’t have GRCs. So in that respect it feels like I’ve been forced to apply: “Nice human rights you’ve got there. Shame if anything were to happen to them.”

I also feel somewhat resentful, because the process is horrible, drawn out and stressful. One of my crucial medical reports – a very simple form – took three months to arrive, delaying my application, because the clinician said he was too busy to do it; some unclear language in a doctor’s hastily scribbled notes meant I had to provide a written statement about some extremely personal and upsetting things I didn’t want to think about, let alone go into detail about in a document that would be read by multiple strangers. And throughout the process I was aware that if my application was rejected there’s no right to appeal; I’d have to wait six months before having to start the whole process again.

Ultimately, it’s a lot of money and effort for something that won’t affect my daily life at all, let alone yours. It means I can now legally become another woman’s wife rather than her husband, it means HMRC won’t misgender me, and that’s about it. Misinformed and malevolent people have spent more than two years scaremongering about what’s ultimately a largely inconsequential piece of paper.

And yet, and yet.

My GRC still means something to me. It means something in the same way that my formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria meant something. The Gender Recognition Panel is a branch of the HM Courts & Tribunal Service. Its president is a judge. My application was assessed by a judicial panel consisting solely of legal and medical professionals, and I can promise you that they are very, very thorough and very, very serious.

Hence my mixed feelings. It’s a horrible process to go through and it’s been a weight on my mind for a long time. But I can’t help feeling that it’s also a form of validation.

Professor Paul Johnson, head of the department of sociology at the University of York, posted this on Twitter today. It’s from the judgement in a 2014 case before the European Court of Human Rights.

Society’s problematic “yuk factor” concerning transgender individuals is not a normative idea that should be supported by the law.

Sharing Johnson’s post, journalist and trans man Freddy McConnell added:

This isn’t a factor in overt anti-trans campaigning or general resistance to trans equality, it is the factor.

Johnson:

In my opinion, most so-called “gender critical” views are underpinned by disgust of transgender people (the “yuk factor”). Because disgust can be socially discrediting – it easily reveals bigotry – GC proponents often try to disguise it by appealing to more “high minded” ideals.

He’s right, of course. Racists and homophobes do this too. It’s (mostly) social death to admit that you are disgusted by the very existence of Black people or of gay people, so you look for a fig leaf to disguise it: “scientific racism” for racists and “family values” or “protecting children” for homophobes.

If you watch the videos of the founding meetings of anti-trans pressure groups or look at their supporters on social media you’ll soon see them take the mask of respectability off. Disgust of trans women isn’t just tolerated. It’s celebrated and often actively encouraged.

There have been many millions of words written by anti-trans activists about trans people, and most of them can be summarised in just one: yuk.

Every cloud has a silver lining. The ongoing delays to gender recognition reform in the UK enable us to analyse other countries’ experiences and judge whether the lurid claims of anti-trans activists have any basis in reality.

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act. It uses the same “self-ID” system that the Westminster and Scots governments propose to use: instead of requiring trans people to get medical reports and a stack of evidence to be judged by a panel they never meet, applicants sign a statutory declaration in front of a lawyer. This declaration states that you intend to live in your correct gender for the rest of your life, and like any statutory declaration there are penalties for fraudulent declarations.

The number of men who have abused this system in order to access women’s spaces in the last five years?

Zero.

The number of frivolous or fraudulent applications?

Also zero.

The same is true of the many other countries that have some form of self-ID.

I’m sure that tomorrow, the UK press and radio will give this information the same prominence they’ve given the fact-free fantasies of anti-reform activists. After all, it’s directly relevant to the announcement on GRA reform Liz Truss is expected to make in the coming days.

While Truss prepares her statement, she might want to refer to her government’s own consultation documents. They stated:  “there will be no change to the provision of women-only spaces and services”; “there will be no change to the NHS medical pathways for trans people”; and most importantly of all, “we are committed to making the lives of trans people easier… trans and non-binary people are members of our society and should be treated with respect.”

A few hundred years ago, a bunch of men decided that every single human on earth could be divided into three (or sometimes five) distinct races. You could tell everything you needed to know about someone by looking at them and perhaps measuring the circumference of their heads: that would tell you what race you were dealing with and how to treat that person.

That classification system was used in horrific ways against those deemed members of “inferior races”, and we’re still living with the terrible consequences today.

Scientifically speaking, it was all bullshit.

Here’s National Geographic:

when scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”

…Everyone has the same collection of genes, but with the exception of identical twins, everyone has slightly different versions of some of them. Studies of this genetic diversity have allowed scientists to reconstruct a kind of family tree of human populations. That has revealed the second deep truth: In a very real sense, all people alive today are Africans.

That’s not to say that there aren’t differences between people and populations. Of course there are. But the categories that were used to define, classify and in many cases oppress people were completely made up. As one of the experts in the National Geographic article puts it:

“if we made racial categories up, maybe we can make new categories that function better.”

You know where I’m going with this. Gender, like race, is a human construction – and we humans are much more complex than a binary gender system allows.

With a binary system, you are either THIS or you are THAT, and nothing else. There are no grey areas, no outliers. But reality doesn’t work that way. Most of us are “typical”; that is, we have many or most of the characteristics associated with the categories “man” or “woman”. But some people are more typical than others, and there is enormous variation.

Cade Hildreth has a good explainer on sex, gender and the important difference between binary and bimodal. Short version: gender is “a spectrum of biological, mental and emotional traits that exist along a continuum.”

The gender binary makes sense for many, maybe even most people. But it is not an immutable law of nature; it’s a classification system human beings came up with. And the more we know about how brains and bodies work, the more we realise how simplistic and unscientific a system it is. The linked article goes into some detail on variations in characteristics such as chromosomes, sex organs and so on. Short version: we’re complicated.

How you respond to that information says a lot about the kind of person you are, I think. I’m fascinated by it, and by anything else that broadens our knowledge: it just underlines that every single human being is pretty much miraculous, a one-off combination of so many different factors. The fact that I am me and you are you is incredibly, mind-bogglingly unlikely, and also very exciting, and the fact that we’re still only at the start of our discoveries is more exciting still. Oh, the places we’ll go!

Not everyone feels that way, I know, and sometimes I feel sorry for them. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be scared of knowledge.